Preaching to the choir (sorry)

Since the seventh Harry Potter book is due to come out in July, and since I have nothing else of consequence to write about, let us enter into a conversation regarding the so-called evilness that is Harry Potter.

Point 1: People, please. Do you really, and I mean honestly, have nothing better to do with your time than to protest the school and/or library board of your local municipality over their selection of these books? Wouldn't it be easier for all of us if you went ahead and took your medication and got some sort of useful hobby, like knitting?

Point 2: Do you want to suck all the fun out of childhood? I guess you don't remember daydreaming during social studies or long-division, wishing you could fly or magically disappear or eat really cool candy or turn someone into a toad. Honey, we have a word for these kinds of fantasies and daydreams. It's called FICTION. If you want to protest something, protest the non-fiction books about the occult, of which I'm sure your local library is filled (actually, I'm kidding here - don't protest them. We also have words for things like that: "democracy" and "open society" come to mind.)

Point 3: Here's what I don't get: no one ever protests the Wizard of Oz anymore. Is it because we've come to accept it as part of our whimsical childhood canon? Is it because EVERYONE and I mean everyone in the western hemisphere has seen the movie about a scillion times, and has come to regard the witches and wizards and other magical creatures in the book and movie exactly as they were intended to be regarded; i.e. as figments of a writer's imagination?

Point 4: I guess what I'm saying is: CHILLAX. Unless your children are developmentally disabled, and even if they are, come to think of it, they will get that this stuff is meant to be a fun little release from reality, and not meant to be practiced at midnight with the local witches' coven.

I think the real problem here is not that people are afraid their kids will somehow get sucked into the occult by reading these books, but that those very same people seem to believe the occult is REALLY weaving an evil, book-purchasing spell around our children as we sit idly by. I'm not saying the occult isn't real--or more to the point, that people don't believe the occult to be real; what I'm saying is that people do not have the power to cast spells on other people. Get a grip. MAGIC DOESN'T REALLY EXIST. And you call yourselves Christian?

Oh, and here's a Point 5 for you: You cannot argue that Harry Potter embodies sin and bad value systems and whatever else you want to say. He embodies standing up for oneself, practicing what one believes in, and fighting the herd-mentality of society that causes people to support things they know to be bad and wrong. (I'm sure there was a more eloquent way of saying that but I'm a little sleep-deprived right now.) These are values every good Christian should stand up and applaud!

I don't get people.

What a week

We live in a sick, sad world. And that's really about all the energy I have right now to comment on Monday's horrific events. Every day at work this week has been like attending an eight-hour funeral and I'm just drained.

What makes me particularly angry about this whole thing is that it showcases to the world the most violent aspect of our supposedly civilized society. And we ARE a violent society--this country was founded by guerrilla fighters who started a war with the British because they had the audacity to tax our TEA, for crying out loud. And I won't even go into a tirade over gun control laws because I think this incident speaks loud enough for everyone to hear. (And by the way, I don't think the usual argument--"criminals can get their hands on guns if they want them badly enough, whether or not they're legal"--applies in this case, since this was a middle-class kid from suburbia with a clean criminal background. I don't for a minute believe he would have known where to get an illegal handgun.)

Violence runs through our veins, and each school shooting and Waco and Oklahoma bombing and invasion of Iraq--which I'm sorry, these things DO NOT happen on a regular basis in most other western countries--highlights to the world what we so like to keep hidden under our SUV-driving, Starbucks-drinking facades.

OK, I guess I had a little more energy than I thought.

Anyway, now I'm rambling and I don't know what I'm trying to say, other than that I really, really want to go back to Canada.

And now I'm tired of talking about death and tragedy. During my weekly Thursday afternoon perusal of the Internets, I came across this really stupid thing on the Best of Craigslist, entitled "143 Reasons I Will be the Best Girlfriend You've Ever Had". So to lighten the mood, I've made up my own, opposing list. Enjoy.

Reasons why I will NOT be the best girlfriend you ever had (and I don’t give a shit if I am or not)

1. I don’t give a shit if I am or not. Being in love with someone is not a competition.
2. I don’t like the color purple. Ok, that’s a lie, but the point is, wtf does color preference have to do with it?
3. I go to the gym, but I still have some cellulite and I don’t look like a supermodel. Sorry.
4. I like to eat. A lot.
5. I don’t keep up my nails.
6. I rarely get my toes done.
7. I drive an automatic, when I drive, and I will never learn how to drive a manual.
8. I don’t want to watch you work on your car. It will not get me hot. What I WOULD like to see is you volunteering to take the car into the shop to get worked on without me having to constantly nag.
   
9. I don’t care what kind of car you drive.
10. I drive a 1996 Ford Contour, baby! Does that get your motor running?
11. I’m short but not little, and it makes me mad that I always have to look up to you. (And why would you find it a turn-on for a woman to always have to crane her neck to see you?)
    
12. I wear granny panties.
13. My hair isn’t long.
14. I can’t guarantee you I won’t steal food off your plate. I’m fat, remember?
15. I won’t always let you be the “man” in the relationship. Whatever that means. I will assert my opinions in ways that I see fit, and I might be aggressive about it if I feel I need to be.
16. I don’t always smell good, particularly early in the morning or after I work out. There’s a little thing humans do, called sweating. I sweat.
    
17. I don’t even know what “ghost ride” means.
18. I’m 30 with the mind of a 30-year-old and the heart of a 30-year-old. If I act like I’m 10, please slap me.
19. I might “burden you” with my PMS problems. I can’t help it – it’s PMS. And if you get on my case about it, I might start yelling or crying hysterically. Or I might just shove a piece of cake in my mouth and ignore you.
20. I don’t have any of my childhood belongings with me because I’m an adult.
21. You + Me + Dancing + Outdoors + Rain = Afternoon spent being miserable because I hate being cold and wet, and you WILL hear about it.
22. If I “accidentally” leave my underwear in your bed, you have my permission to be grossed out.

There are no words.

Reasons #1 - 1,097 not to live here

This article by Gene Weingarten pretty much sums up why Washington, D.C. is the worst place on the planet. You might be surprised!

Since I am not naive enough to believe that anyone will actually click on the link and read the article, here it is in a nutshell. The Washington Post hired Joshua Bell, a world-renowned violinist, to play at a metro station, disguised him as a street performer, and watched what happened. Would people be amazed by the beauty of this man's performance, stop to listen, create a crowd of onlookers? Would the man be recognized as the musical virtuoso he is, would he make a load of cash? The answer to all these questions: no. Only a handful of people even looked at the guy, much less stopped to listen to his masterful playing, much less gave him any money. Would I have stopped? Probably not, because, as I have made abundantly clear, this city has eaten my soul alive.

This is what why.i.hate.dc had to say about it:

The other reason I'd walk right on by is that Washington gives its citizens cancer of the soul where the daily grind and death by paper cut slights and inconveniences make it impossible to appreciate anything. I thought that was just me. But this Post article seems to imply otherwise. It's everyone. I mean, check out those videos. The commuters look like cows going to the slaughter. Not even a virtuoso can brighten their day. Yeah, D.C. is awesome like that.

I tend to agree.

P.S. I've added something new to my blog, which I realize no one cares about but which I am going to tell you about anyway. It's a link to my new reading log (see sidebar), in which I will critique and/or discuss books I'm reading. It's mostly for my own amusement but feel free to read if you like.

Here's the part where I quote Wayne's World

Hey, where you going? OK, OK, I'm sorry! Come on back, come on back. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll figure something out.

Sorry to be such a downer all the time. But hey, this won't last forever - spring is just around the corner, or so I hear. I wouldn't know, since it snowed again last night. Last night being a night in APRIL. But, you know what they say, April snowstorms bring May NOTHING. I mean, I can accept snow in April if, say, I was in the mountains. However, not only am I not in any mountains, I am no where near a mountain, or even a small hill. Or I could accept snow in April if I lived above the Arctic Circle. Then snow would not only be OK, it would probably be expected. Snow in April is not acceptable, however, if one lives in the midst of a swampy plain, where half the year it is so hot I cannot walk out my front door without breaking into a sweat.

But I digress. Despite the weather sucking my ass, two very good things happened today.

1) We bought a ring. What I remember of it is very pretty, although the details are kind of fuzzy in my mind. We have to have it sized and the stone set, so it'll be about a month before I see it again. But still, ring bought=yay.

2) We just got home from seeing Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriquez double feature. While it is incredibly gory, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, when I wasn't trying not to wretch. I will probably never watch it again, as it is an incredible investment of time, particularly time during which one cannot snack, since one would run the risk of puking all over strangers if one were to see it on a full stomach. Still, the ending of the second film will have you screaming "BOOYAH, MOTHERFUCKER!" and you will feel like kicking the shit out of someone, but in a good way.

Realizations

It has become increasingly evident to me that I am in the wrong field. By “field” I refer to librarianship, in particular, reference service. I do not like working with people (hence the title of this blog); I do not enjoy helping people figure things out, nor do I enjoy answering their questions, helping them find information, or explaining things in a thorough and patient manner. My ideal job would be to sit in a dusty back room somewhere and never talk to anyone. I sort of knew this was my predilection while I was in library school (ok, honestly, I knew it outright from the beginning), but I thought that I would be able to find jobs in librarianship that would enable me to work more with books than with people. I was wrong. I mean, those kinds of jobs exist, they just don’t exist for me. Most of my background, unfortunately, has been in reference services, and I have no experience doing things that would get me away from people--like say, collection management or cataloging. (And I’m not detail-oriented enough to be a cataloger anyway). I had hoped to work in an environment that would allow me to do a variety of tasks and thus take the focus off all-people all-the-time--and I believe it is probably true that in a decently staffed, normal-sized library, I would only have to work 2-3 hours per day on the reference desk, thus enabling me to keep a modicum of my sanity--but this is not the job I currently have. In the job I have now, I sit on the reference-information-circulation-help-me-I-don’t-know-how-to-use-a-computer desk 6-8 hours a day (the six-hour days are the days when I’m scheduled to be in 2 hours before the library opens). I have no private work space at all, nor any space I can escape to during the day. I don’t drive, so I don’t even have a car I can go sit in if I need to. Most of the time I’m so bored I could cry, which is no fun, but it’s even less fun to be constantly in the public eye, where I can’t even listen to music or have private phone conversations (which makes it a real blast when I have to make an appointment with the lady-parts doctor).

In a nutshell, all-people-every-day DRIVE ME CRAZY. I cannot take this anymore. The combination of the constant boredom plus the mainly customer-service aspects of this job are making me really unhappy. I never thought I would be this age, still struggling at a menial position for peanuts, and doing it in front of the whole world. I feel like my brain is dying.

Help me, Internet!

And while you're at it, check out my new and improved Shameless Self Promotion on the sidebar. OK, it's not really improved, but it is new. OK, it's not really new, but at least it's been updated.